A study in critical readership, this wide-ranging collection of essays challenges accepted theories on everything from classics such as Charlotte Bronte's Villette to more contemporary works like Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man. Explored are ideas of sexual subversion and queer politics. Literature's sacred cows are reevaluated, and new ways to explore both reading and writing are offered.

Ancient menstrual wisdom for modern women For our ancestors the menstrual cycle was a source of wonderful creative, spiritual, sexual, emotional, mental and physical energies. It was a gift that empowered women to renew themselves each month, to manifest and create the world around them, to connect deeply with the land and their family, and to express deep wisdom and inspiration. This ancient female teaching is still available to us in our mythology and nursery tales. Miranda Gray introduces modern women to their unique cyclic nature and guides them in accepting and expressing a passionate and creative cycle-empowered life. She explores the women's wisdom contained in western mythology and traditional stories and offers practical exercises and methods including the 'Moon Dial' to explore the depths of being a Cyclic Woman. Red Moon will transform the way you think about yourself, your cycle and your life! Red Moon helps you to: * accept your cyclic self and connect with each of the different powerful energies of the four phases of your menstrual cycle * enjoy and apply these energies creatively, sexually and spiritually to everyday life * re-awaken the cyclic myths for yourself as a personal journey * create rites of passage to bring emotional acceptance and transformation Contains revised and new content and illustrations. "Red Moon has helped me to gain a whole new positive vision about my menstrual cycle. The wonderful combination of stories, inspirational information and practical exercises makes this a handbook for women's transformation." Sophia Style, Menstrual Cycle Educator, Spain. Miranda Gray is an advocate for the recognition of the cyclic nature of women. She is an artist, designer, writer, and alternative therapy teacher. She lives what she teaches.

An updated edition of the Sunday Times Bestseller

Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.

A year on since the advent of #metoo, Beard looks at how the discussions have moved on during this time, and how that intersects with issues of rape and consent, and the stories men tell themselves to support their actions. In trademark Beardian style, using examples ancient and modern, Beard argues, 'it's time for change - and now!'

From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

The 59th annual volume of the Socialist Register examines the growth of corporate power and other important organizational trends in global capitalism. It rejects such notions as stakeholder capitalism and reviews the organisation and strategies of unions and the left, and its current and potential practices, as it searches for new routes to socialism.

Published as a standalone on International Woman's Day, the essay that became a touchstone of the feminist movement and inspired the term 'mansplaining', with an afterword on its origins

This famous and influential essay, which describes the time when, at a party, a man explained to Rebecca Solnit the argument of her own book, inspired the term 'mansplaining' and established Solnit as a vital figure of the feminist movement, and one of the leading thinkers of our time.

Fierce, incisive and funny, it exposes the inherent sexism of our patriarchal culture.

Nirmala S. Salgado offers a groundbreaking study of the politics of representation of Buddhist nuns. Challenging assumptions about writing on gender and Buddhism, Salgado raises important theoretical questions about the applicability of liberal feminist concepts and language to the practices of Buddhist nuns. Based on extensive research in Sri Lanka as well as on interviews with Theravada and Tibetan nuns from around the world, Salgado's study invites a reconsideration of female renunciation. How do scholarly narratives continue to be complicit in reinscribing colonialist and patriarchal stories about Buddhist women? In what ways have recent debates contributed to the construction of the subject of the Theravada bhikkhuni? How do key Buddhist concepts such as dukkha, samsara, and sila ground female renunciant practices? Salgado's provocative analysis of modern discourses about the supposed empowerment of nuns challenges interpretations of female renunciation articulated in terms of secular notions such as ''freedom'' in renunciation, and questions the idea that the higher ordination of nuns constitutes a movement in which female renunciants act as agents seeking to assert their autonomy in a struggle against patriarchal norms. Salgado argues that the concept of a global sisterhood of nuns-an idea grounded in a notion of equality as a universal ideal-promotes a discourse of dominance about the lives of non-Western women and calls for more nuanced readings of the everyday renunciant practices and lives of Buddhist nuns. Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between religion and power, subjectivity and gender, and feminism and postcolonialism.

One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, the author of such powerful and influential books as Ain't I a Woman and Black Looks, Bell Hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must be achieved hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race. Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays, most of them new works, are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. Hooks defiantly creates positive plans for the future rather than dwell in theories of a crisis beyond repair. The essays here address a spectrum of topics to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; internalized racism in the movies and media. Hooks presents a challenge to the patriarchal family model, explaining how it perpetuates sexism and oppression in black life. She calls out the tendency of much of mainstream America to conflate "black rage" with murderous, pathological impulses, rather than seeing it as a positive state of being. And in the title essay she writes about the "killing rage" - the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism - finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength, and a catalyst for productive change. Her analysis is rigorous and her language unsparingly critical, but Hooks writes with a common touch that has made her a favorite of readers far from universities.Bell Hooks's work contains multitudes; she is a feminist who includes and celebrates men, a critic of racism who is not separatist or Afrocentric, an academic who cares about popular culture.

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist Punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new "Punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

"The Concise Companion to Feminist Theory" introduces readers to the broad scope of feminist theory over the last 35 years.
Introduces readers to the broad scope of feminist theory over the past 35 years.
Guides students along the cutting edge of current feminist theory.
Suitable for students and scholars of all fields touched by feminist thought.
Covers an exceptionally broad range of disciplines, discourses and feminist positions.
Organised around concepts rather than schools of feminism.

How do we represent the experience of being a gender and sexual outlaw? In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women's and gay liberation-including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet-were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called "normal" gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments-from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth-and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind's eye and interpreted by diverse publics. Surprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly generic, popular forms, including the sequential format of comic strip serials, the stock figures or character-types of science fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer and feminist film, literature, and visual culture including Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970), Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1976-1983), Lizzy Borden's Born in Flames (1983), and Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1989-1991), Fawaz shows how artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass audiences in the modern United States. Against the ideal of ceaseless gender and sexual fluidity and attachments to rigidly defined identities, Queer Forms argues for the value of shapeshifting as the imaginative transformation of genders and sexualities across time. By taking many shapes of gender and sexual divergence we can grant one another the opportunity to appear and be perceived as an evolving form, not only to claim our visibility, but to be better understood in all our dimensions.

A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.